Less than a week after former F.B.I. director James Comey was unceremoniously axed, Donald Trump remains his own worst enemy, simultaneously declaring Comey’s ouster an open-and-shut case even as he throws gasoline on the firestorm he created.

Trump has already assured the nation that Comey’s vacant position will be filled imminently, with a jostling host of candidates being interviewed Saturday, including acting F.B.I. director Andrew McCabe, Texas Republican senator John Cornyn, and Alice Fisher, a justice department official under George W. Bush, among others. “Almost all of them are well-known,” said Trump, speaking to reporters on Air Force One. “They've been vetted over their lifetime essentially, but very well-known, highly respected, really talented people. And that's what we want for the F.B.I.”

If the president is pushing for a tidy transition, he faces substantial opposition from those unwilling to accept his typically undulating reasons for sacking Comey. Initially, his administration suggested the decision was sparked by Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein’s recommendation that Comey be removed over his handling of the Hillary Clinton e-mail investigation. Immediately, this was widely deemed an inelegantly cloaked guise to remove Comey from overseeing an official probe into suspected collusion between Russia and Trump’s election campaign. Since then, the outspoken president has claimed he alone was responsible for the decision, branding Comey a “showboat,” a “grandstander,” and telling NBC News he was “going to fire him regardless of the recommendation.”

Meanwhile, it seems the president cannot help but make the most significant political crisis in a generation even worse, insinuating that he possesses taped recordings of conversations between Comey and himself. “James Comey better hope that there are no ‘tapes” of our conversations before he starts leaking to the press!” he warned, via Twitter. The White House has neither confirmed nor denied the existence of such tapes, with press secretary Sean Spicer declaring Trump had nothing more to say on the matter, but that his tweet was “not a threat” to Comey.

Trump’s sacking of Comey has become a stomping ground for partisan conflict. As the Senate returns to Capitol Hill on Monday after a recess, members continue to clash about the need for a special prosecutor to oversee the Justice Department investigation into Russian meddling, with Democrats widely emphasizing the necessity of such an appointment, and many Republicans remaining skeptical. “It’s not a criminal investigation,” Senator Lindsey Graham told NBC. “I see no need for a special commission yet.”

The president's possible possession of tapes, however, has been met with sustained cross-party criticism, with senior lawmakers calling on the president to submit any recordings. “If there are any tapes of this conversation, they need to be turned over,” Graham continued. Speaking on ABC News’s This Week, Mark Warner, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee warned, “we have got to make sure that those tapes, if they exist, don't mysteriously disappear.”

His sentiment was echoed by Senate Democratic leader Charles Schumer, who told CNN that if such tapes existed, “the president should turn them over immediately. To destroy them would be a violation of law.”

“If there are no tapes, he should apologize to Jim Comey and the American people for misleading them,” he added, suggesting that senior Democratic senators might attempt to refuse to confirm a new F.B.I. director until a special prosecutor is named.

Speaking on Fox News Saturday night, Trump was reticent amid the swelling political pressure. “I won't talk about that,” he said, when pressed about the recordings. “All I want is for Comey to be honest, and I hope he will be.”

If Trump was taciturn, former director of national intelligence James Clapper, who served under the Obama administration, was not, crashing into the debate over the weekend by accusing Trump of placing America’s democratic institutions “under assault” in an interview with CNN Sunday.

“I think in many ways our institutions are under assault,” he said. “Both externally, and that’s the big news here, is Russia’s interference in our election system. And I think as well our institutions are under assault internally.”

Asked if he meant that the internal assault was executed by the president himself he replied: “Exactly.”

Moving onto a later interview with ABC, he added pointedly “the Russians have to consider [Comey's sacking] as another victory on the scoreboard for them.”

Writing unsubstantial, provocative tweets while simultaneously overseeing the significant process of choosing a director for the F.B.I., there is a growing move to hold Trump to account. He might not want to talk about Comey-gate any longer but, when he looks to the Senate to support his upcoming appointment, he might find that they want an explanation. If the tapes exist, and he hands them in, perhaps they will do the talking, anyway.